Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

I was blogrolling (surfing blogs) at the weekend and came across "wordrobe". What I thought was misspelling is, in fact, a noun that refers to a person's vocabulary. It's a mix of "word" and "wardrobe". Example: "He blogs every day so he needs an extensive wordrobe." Silly? Maybe. But it also shows that English is in motion, as football players (American) would say.

Talking of new words, back in the boom, Douglas Coupland wrote the book that captured the Zeitgeist, Generation X, and created a noun that brilliantly summed up so much of the '90s by putting the prefix "Mc-" and "job" together to give us "McJob". It means work in a service related field with no prestige, low pay and little opportunity for advancement: "...a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his McJob (p.5)." Inspired, no doubt, by Coupland, an anonymous genius then combined "Macintosh" (overpriced computer) and "trash" to create "Macintrash". Example: "I hate working on these feckin' Macintrashes!" The great thing about this word is that it is so accurate, as anyone who's had to deal with those machines will know.

What do you call a member of a street gang? Careful, unless you're carrying a piece. One word is "loc", which comes from the Spanish word "loco" meaning "crazy." So we get: "Yo! Don't mess with him. He's a loc." The plural might be locs, but in gangland that word also means dark sunglasses: "?Donde estᠭis locs? ("Where are my sun glasses?")

As we can see, English is a moving vehicle. All aboard?